this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2024
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Lefty Memes
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lefties love to hate on liberals for whatever reason. Even though the definition of liberal is not very specific and encompassing.
I still haven't quite figured out why. Idk if people just don't broadly understand the definition of liberalism in a political context, or if it's just "hurr durr not lefty bad" shenanigans.
on another note, if anybody in the comments has any expansive explanation to this, please, indulge my curiosity.
In the U.S., it's from anger at the Democratic party. Mostly anger at, "when they go low, we go high," "reach across the aisle," "we need a strong Republican party," tolerance paradox, and that kind of stuff. Liberal economics isn't really compatible with leftism either.
i can understand that, but that's not really liberalism, as far as it should be defined anyway. Granted the dem party has a significant overlap with liberalism so there is that.
as far as economics i'm not really sure, i guess i just don't know much about lefty economics outside of the fact that people seem to hate everything, which is definitely one of the choices of all time. Although liberal economics has a pretty broad definition, considering it goes through like 200 years of history up until today.
really? I guess it might be different in the US, but liberalism here in the US is primarily governmental, you can be liberal governmentally, and socially progressive for example. Liberalism here in the US pretty much amounts to the founding ideas of the US government, so it makes sense it would still be around in some capacity today.
Provided you're willing to make excuses when your party isn't socially progressive.
it depends on what you classify as socially progressive, but generally most liberals are going to be onboard with socially progressive ideas. Especially if well thought out and put together. They just don't publicly champion them because nobody really cares and it's not as popular, pushing support is more popular than just yelling about supporting it at the end of the day.
It's really hard to make an argument for removing the rights of people under liberalism. Unless it's something like fascism, where you're inherently removing rights, and therefore violating the principles of liberalism.
It's the new wrench to move the ratchet
I think it's American rugged individualism, conservatives have an easy time agreeing on binary decisions (women's rights bad, science bad, immigrants bad, etc) whereas anything progressive requires complications solutions and problem definitions. In that there are many right answers, and liberals seem willing to be more angry with someone 95% in agreement with them rather than the people trying to drag the country backwards.
this confuses me a little bit, but i think i understand where you're coming from. Liberalism by nature values variation in ideas and discussion surrounding them, so it would make sense you would end up debating across lines more frequently. Although i'm not really sure what the first part is about. I think even if true, you would still find a large majority of liberal people willing to work with more progressive people given a common shared goal. In fact i tend to find at least here on lemmy, that lefties tend to be more fractural than any other group of people (just look at all the election discussion and people yelling at each other about things, man vs bear etc)
i guess you could say the dissenting opinions are liberal, but i wouldn't really agree with that on face value. I think a correct way of characterizing it would be that liberals are more willing to disagree with someone, and argue about things, but are also more willing to tolerate variance of viewpoints as well.
i will agree with the tidbit about progressive solutions being more complex and problematic, i think that's a broader issue present among social progressivism right now. We can accomplish the same goals with simpler solutions, and i think that would be an arguably better path forward. For the most part at least.
I'm gonna invent my own political ideology ("I am not altogether on anybody's side, because nobody is altogether on my side" and all that) and call it responsibilitarianism. OK, the word kinda defeats it alone. Point being that a political structure is as good as the fullness and equality of responsibility for its citizens.
i would argue that american liberalism has been pretty successful historically, though it's had rough times over the years, we are a new nation, so that is to be expected. And a lot of those were fairly global at one point.
So i'm not really sure i follow the inability of it to function in society. Although i don't think liberalism functions properly in society primarily because people are improperly using it, and then getting surprised when it doesnt work.
also this is a fairly strict way of defining a political ideology, the most broad way to define it would be "a governmental form of societal cohesion to promote function as a unit towards a common goal" There are broader ways to define it, but you start getting outside of politics at that point, and into society at large.
Not really.
My point was that liberalism functions pretty similarly to monarchy or and kind of tyranny when those conditions about responsibility are not met.
Not a new idea too, digging through treasure troves of antique literature one can find it said many times. Not just equality, but fullness of responsibility. You can lay down the responsibility for your existence and actions.
i'm not sure how you're defining this. But if we're going by a governmental definition, the modern chinese government would be quite a bit newer, but the chinese people, and previous governments have existed LONG before. The US as a nation, and as a government is considerably newer than basically every existing nation, even more so when considering scale.
i think i'm following, but i don't see how this is explicitly unique to something like liberalism. I think this is an objective challenge for basically all forms of government, including tyrannical ones.
Yes, that's exactly my point. Every valuable political ideology works at keeping some important dimension in the minds of the masses. There's none as far as I can see in that part about responsibility. That is, it was existent in fringe things I've read about religion and deontology in my childhood\teens, in the context of science and philosophy and ethics, but not generally popular.
interesting, that's definitely a concern as far as politics go, and a primary reason i tend be political nihilist, i guess i've just never thought about it in that particular manner before lol.